In the words of another great man of the theatre, Oscar Hammerstein II:
"We got football, we got baseball, and a lot of dandy games. What
ain't we got?..." He was writing, of course, of the US Navy in the
South Pacific in WWII. But my sentiments tend into the same channel when
it comes to companies like Edward Hall's Propeller - "a regular all
male ensemble of actors" who "aim to perform Shakespeare's plays
with [this'n'that praiseworthy aim]" (programme). Well, they do;
but while the sex-starved sailors knew, though they didn't like it, why
the South Pacific furnished them with nothing to put on a new white suit
for when what they wanted was something there was no substitute for, these
all-male productions leave me feeling a bit like the little boy pointing
at the chinless
wonder in the famous old Punch cartoon and demanding, "Mummy, what's
that man for?" I put the question at the interval of Propeller's
A Midsummer Night's Dream to all the Arts Theatre's press and promotion
and education reps and all the other critics gathered in the bar, and
they all looked at me. It was as if I had questioned some law of nature.
There were mutters about original productions, which died away when I
pointed out that smooth-faced flute-toned prepubescent boys were not the
same thing as mature male actors. (I once denounced a company in a Guardian
review for playing Kate and Bianca in Shrew as "a pair of
clumping blue-jowled drag queens". Their artistic director told me
later that they had played to full houses throughout an Oz tour by quoting
this phrase on their pre-publicity and outside the theatres where they
played, which I suppose says something about the power of the critic,
though I'm blowed if I can make out quite what.)

But no-one I asked at the Arts had any real answer, and the programme
is almost silent, though the question must have arisen before, surely.
The only reference is in a piece by the "performing text editor",
who remarks en passant that "an all-male cast may [my itals]
help to bring out the androgyny in the play, a heightened version of the
Elizabethan concern with spiritual relationships between people of the
same sex". This strikes me as a fine piece of all-my-eye when it
comes to the wonderful eroticism of the Dream, in which I'll venture
that Will, whatever his own predilections, would have thought himself
thrice-blest if they'd let him put a sexy lady or two on the stage.

It isn't even as if a question of Political Correctness were involved
as, arguably, with the colourblind casting that is a bit controversial
these days (see, e.g., Biyi Bandele's piece in The Guardian of
26 April). There are clearly two sides to that one; I don't think I risk
having my collar felt by the PC-Police [no pun intended] if I question
whether it's always in the interests of the Jamesian specificity of reference:
I well remember in a Measure for Measure, when a particularly fair
and Nordic-looking Isabella said to a very black
Claudius, "Heaven shield my mother played my father fair", a
voice along the row hissed "Well obviously she didn't". A critic
in The Times wrote recently, re the National's Henry V,
that we are in "an era that should now be used to colour-blind casting";
so that's all right then. The recent TV Twelfth Night on the other
hand used a mixed-race cast as it should be done, with great intelligence
-- white Olivia, black Orsino and court, Asian illegal-immigrant twins
-- and should have worked a treat. Its misfortune was to be deadly
boring, played almost without expression at funereal pace: a surprise
from Tim Supple, one of those directors who impressed enormously during
his student days here; a Merry Wives as English folk-play lives
on in my mind after twenty years.

Why this fad for sex-blind Shax, however, I have no idea. A Guardian
critic wrote recently of a one-sex Richard II that the lack and
smallness of female roles in that play meant that "the gender swapping
adds little"; he's an ex-colleague that I know quite well, so I wrote
to ask him what he thought it ever adds; he hasn't replied.

Not that this Dream wasn't, bating that, a very beautiful production,
finely spoken, with atmospheric live harmonica music and suitable folksong
(a worksong as leitmotiv for the mechanicals, the Copper Family's "Sportsmen
Arouse" for the huntsmen), plenty for the eye in clever set and costuming,
and a chorus of Titania's fairies in which all the players not actually
needed in that scene mucked in; it was excellently played all round, especially
by Guy Williams's dominant but occasionally self-doubting Oberon. But,
while all the men-as-maids resolutely eschewed camp and played perfectly
competently and sort-of-convincingly if necessary allowances were made,
their very presence undermined the
Flute-as-Thisbe joke entirely; and, more generally, the amorous conviction
of the piece throughout. Why? Oh why? And why again? But answer comes
there none.

Responses to this piece intended for the Readers'
Forum may be sent to the Editor at L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk.